Cartilage and Skin (17 page)

The piano ceased, and the people began to move away, no longer held by the spell of the music or by some tacit, respectful obligation to listen. Voices grew louder, and a few people began to exit the room.

“You must be one of the new consultants,” Ralph said.

“You're the first person not to assume that I'm somebody's girlfriend.”

People shuffled past them now, like a departing audience, and Ralph stepped back from the woman, as if he were at risk of getting caught in the flow of people.

“Stick your head into my office sometime,” he said. “I'm on the third floor.”

She smiled again. Her hand rose slightly and then returned to her side; perhaps she stopped herself from giving him a small, silly wave goodbye.

“There's no reason you should feel like an outsider in the company,” he said.

“You're Ralph Banks, right?” she asked, and before he could respond, she told him that her name was Amanda.

“Of course,” he said.

Bemused, she looked at him for an instant; then a faint smile crept on her face as he too smiled. “Of course,” she echoed.

Later—proud, amused, and detached—he stood before the fireplace and inspected everyone, as if he were a director of a play and the men and women, dressed up in their business attire and ruled by decorum, were his actors, a group of children on a school stage, the players at a community theatre. The fat woman was sitting in a high-back chair before a bay window. Although she appeared a bit listless and sleepy, the man glanced at her from time to time, apparently more intrigued by her performance than by anyone else's. She kept looking at the doorway, probably waiting for Ralph to come rescue her; she never turned around in the chair to see him standing just a few feet behind her. She dipped her finger in her drink and then placed the tip of her finger on her tongue. Then again, she poked the floating ice cube to the bottom of the glass and licked her finger as the cube bobbed back to the surface. Crossing and re-crossing her thick legs, she continually looked at the door. When she finished her drink, Ralph came up behind her.

“You almost ready?” he asked and placed his hand on her shoulder.

“If you're ready.” She set the empty glass on an end table and slowly rose to her feet, pushing herself up from the chair, like an old, brittle woman. With his hand on the small of her back, he ushered her out of the room, into the foyer. He brought his mouth close to the side of her face.

“How do you feel?”

“Tired.”

He left her in the foyer, where she stood looking down at the tile floor, almost entranced, the entire mass of her body delicately balanced upon two weak ankles, like an egg on its end. Ralph returned shortly with their coats over his arm. He touched her back again, steadying her. When they came to the front door, she hesitated.

“I promised Susan I say goodbye. She invited us to dinner.”

“I spent the whole evening saying hello and goodbye. Give her a call tomorrow.”

He opened the door and led her out into the night, which was charged—tinted with a veil of thin blue—as if the clear, cold stillness were somehow electrical. They walked down the wide driveway, lined on one side with cars and a low fieldstone wall topped with yellow lanterns, the sickly glare of which seemed frozen, like golden halos painted upon the dark backdrop of night. The couple walked with their heads down, their breath floating in gray puffs before their mouths. Once inside their car, a metallic silver Volvo, he reached over and placed his hand on her leg, and driving off, away from the party and the enormous house, she seemed to settle into the seat, as if her bones grew pliant and bent beneath the weight of her own flesh, while her fingers untangled themselves from the fabric of her dress that she'd been clutching, and her hand, relaxed now, crept over and covered his hand, her fingers slipping between his fingers, curling into a single fist, his hand and her hand, on her thick leg. She settled further into the seat and allowed her head to loll. He stared blankly out at the road before him and continued to hold her hand even after she fell asleep. Their house was a little ranch, set far back from the road, at the end of a packed gravel driveway. He pulled beside the parked station-wagon. She lifted her head and looked about dreamily, finally retrieving her hand from his, to scratch at white crust at the corner of her mouth. He walked around the car, opened the door for her, and stooped a little to slip his arm around her back. She leaned against him as they headed up the slate walkway. Upon the cement steps, he fumbled out his house keys, her head on his shoulder, his arms around her.

“Are you going to be sick?” he asked, but she didn't answer.

The inside of the house was warm, and a faint sour odor permeated the rooms. He was already undressing her as she pressed into him more fully, leaning now with no more effort to stand on her own. He let her coat fall to the floor, and brushed it to the baseboard with an awkward swipe of his foot. They lumbered as a single body down the hallway, her hands dangling limply as his hands tugged at her zipper, exposing her broad, white back. He had to lean away from her to allow her black gown to slip down to her feet, and the gown, now gathered about her ankles, was shuffled and dragged along the hardwood floor; she made no attempt to lift her feet free until she came to the edge of the bed. There, with a little push, he deposited her. He squatted beside the edge of the bed, balled up her dress, and tossed it beneath an ironing board standing in the corner. He took off her shoes and, by some apparent whim, threw one into the bathroom and the other out into the hall. Then, with a soft moan, he slid up her body, tracing his chin along her thigh and resting it just beneath her breasts. He watched her lips move with her heavy breathing. Shutting his eyes and turning his head, he kissed her pale skin, his hands now gliding up her arms, his fingers slipping under her bra straps and easing them off her shoulders, all the while his body moving further up, until his temple rested upon the V of her collarbone and the whole weight of his body was atop her. He nestled and stirred, as if settling into plush couch cushions, burrowing into her flesh. The light was on, but he didn't bother to get up and shut it. They remained motionless for a long time. He would have appeared to be sleeping if not for the occasional moment when he pressed his lips to her shoulder, not so much to kiss her skin as to taste it. The first sign of dawn revealed itself through the window as the daylight spread deeper into the room, vanquishing the odd shadows cast by the dim electric light. When he finally rolled off of her and lay on his back, she also moved. She mumbled. Her arm rose of its own accord, her big hand groping for him; she was uneasy and restless, until she found his belt and held onto it. He slipped his hand over hers, and again they slept. She breathed audibly, her mouth partly agape. Suddenly but slowly, he sat up, peeled her fingers from his belt, and eased himself off the bed. He went into the bathroom, came out again, and saw that she was still asleep, though now clutching the bed cover. At the door, he clicked off the light. He stood for a while, looking at her as if he longed to climb back in bed but was restraining the urge. At last, he walked over to the dresser, which was cluttered with tiny bottles and cosmetics. He wrote on a yellow notepad beside the phone that he'd be back by one o'clock, and then propped the notepad up against the phone. Her voice sounded, deliberate and clear.

“Is it that woman from the party?” she asked.

“What?” He turned around.

“Is that where you always go? That woman you were talking to at the party. Is she the one?”

“No,” he said. “I'm not like that. I could never—”

“Okay.” She rolled over, so her back faced him. A slight sound escaped her throat; she might have been crying.

“I have to pick up order forms. The book route is demanding more time than—”

“Okay,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Okay. Just wash up before you get back into my bed.”

He stared at her, his whole body tense, unmoving. When he spoke, his voice seemed so full of anguish that it might crack. “Don't break my heart,” he said. “Not you. Please.”

She didn't answer.

“Please,” he said, still staring and motionless. “I'll be back right away. I'll rush like mad. I have to—” he began, but then quickly left the room. Walking down the hall, he softly said, “I'll be right back.”

In the kitchen, he walked directly to a cabinet and took out two cans of tuna fish. He got a can opener from a drawer and left the kitchen. His pea coat hung from a hook in the hallway. Outside in the cold, he put on the coat and, in the same motion, slipped the cans of tuna and the opener into one of the deep pockets. Simultaneously, he buttoned up the coat, drove the station-wagon out into the road, and clicked off the radio. Then his expression went as blank as death, and he was only driving. He held the wheel with both hands. After a while, he passed into an underwater tunnel that moaned with the sound of car tires. He emerged from the tunnel and was greeted by orange cones and heavy machinery, abandoned road construction. The city was relatively quiet on this Sunday morning, moving in slow motion, groggy and just waking up. At last, when Ralph pulled up to a stoplight, his expression changed, not to take on life once again, but to set itself in a hard, brutal grimace, a block of bone, muscle, and cartilage thinly veiled beneath his skin. Suddenly, he drove through the red light and kept on driving with little regard for the laws of traffic, speeding through one intersection after another, turning without a signal. He came to a tight, cramped street, where the huddled buildings seemed to lean forward over the road, and the parked cars choked the passageway. He slowed down, but continued forward, until he found a spot where a large pile of heaped garbage bags had tumbled into the road; he gently plowed the station-wagon into the pile, and leaving the tail of his car protruding into the road, he shut the engine and got out. Although he walked briskly, and the air was fiercely cold, his face remained locked, but not exactly in irritation; rather, he seemed to be silently enduring a nasty pain. He walked several blocks and then turned down a side street. On the left was a long, windowless brick wall, the side or back of a building, along which a row of cars parked. On the other side was neither a curb nor sidewalk, so the doors simply opened up onto the street. The metal cellar doors and casement windows peeping over the edge of the road seemed to suggest that much of the life here was subterranean. Above him, several windows were sealed up with plywood, as if the residents inside—undoubtedly poor and very likely caught somewhere between struggle and defeat—were gradually working their way down to the cellar, where lost and neglected people came to accept their own surrender. The building appeared to be a monument to living suicide, to those interred in life; and the cellar, most of all, seemed like a good place to end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh was heir to. Perhaps it was disillusionment with mankind, the crushing weight of discontent or of failure, or simply, in some cases, a tortured mind, that woke up a person's dormant capacity to succumb, as if anguish could fracture into pieces as numerous and light as snowflakes, float away, and dissolve, at the very moment a person laid down his head and yielded to sleep. Ralph entered the building through one of the doors and ascended a narrow staircase up to the second and then to the third floor. The hall was dimly lit, and little stubs of copper pipe stuck up from the floor where someone had apparently ripped out the baseboard heating. A person was walking down the hall. Ralph kept his gaze focused on the copper stubs, his face averted. The person, also with his head down, passed Ralph without acknowledgement and then bounded quickly and loudly down the steps. A radio was playing in one of the rooms. Ralph paused before one of the doors and glanced both ways down the empty corridor. He took out his keys and gently opened the door, letting the pale light from the hallway vaguely spread itself throughout the room, which was musty and poignant with the odor of disuse and trapped air. Ralph walked to the freestanding light. A figure stirred on top of the bed, but before Ralph could expose it to the light, it slipped to the floor and scurried under the bed. Ralph turned on the light. He then went back to the door, glanced up and down the hallway again, and locked the door. Moving quickly, without looking around to assess—or reassess—the setting, he put the two cans of tuna on the counter and opened them. He walked over to the bed that was pushed up against the cast iron radiator, and began to search the floor with his eyes. Still methodic, still with his face compacted into a hard knot, he dropped to his knees and briefly reached under the bed. Now with a green, plastic salad bowl in his hand, he rose to his feet again and walked back to the counter. He emptied the tuna into the bowl and set it on the floor beside the bed. He stepped back and crossed his arms at his chest. Motionlessly, he stared at the bottom of the bed. A dog leash, fastened to the radiator, trailed over the mattress and disappeared beneath the bed.

“Come on,” Ralph muttered. “Come on.”

Nothing moved.

“Come eat,” he said, in a warmer tone. “Let me take the gag off. I know you don't like it. Come on, you bastard.”

He continued to gaze. As rigid as wood or stone, he didn't say anything. Nothing happened. The muffled sound of the radio filtered in from another room; footfalls sounded in the hallway. Ralph unfolded his arms and let them hang at his sides. Then, all at once, he flung himself at the bed and pulled at the leash. The bed began to slide across the floor, as if the leash were also fastened underneath to the frame. Besides the sound of Ralph grunting and cursing, as well as the legs of the bed dragging across the floor, there was a faint but shrill voice—similar to the screechy cries of a scared rodent.

Kyle stood looking out the window in his living room, with his back toward a man who was sitting on the couch. The man was dressed in the dungarees and jacket of the refrigeration company. He held the cap in his lap. His gaze, which was soft and slow, continually drifted from the carpet before his feet, up to Kyle, then back to the floor again.